Endgames

“Snowpiercer” and “Begin Again.”

Chris Evans leads a revolt on a train in a thriller directed by Bong Joon-ho.

Illustration by Kikuo Johnson

In one of the most mysterious passages in Revelation, Christ opens the seals of a book held by God, and unleashes, each on a steed of a different color, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, generally interpreted as symbols of war, pestilence, famine, and death. It is an awesome moment. In the somewhat less sacred precincts of the movie business, catastrophe has been a beloved subject for filmmakers from the beginning. In D. W. Griffith’s “Intolerance” (1916), the Master staged the fall of the Babylonian Empire and the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of the Huguenots. Yet both these events were, so to speak, local; and so were the mishaps in such nineteen-seventies disaster movies as “Airport” and “The Poseidon Adventure.” “Titanic” was a huge success in 1997, but, at this point, it’s hard to see how hundreds of people splashing around in a capsized ocean liner would produce much of a tingle on opening weekend. The current designers of awe, in Hollywood and elsewhere, have gone back to the Apocalypse. They’ve created what might be called the Seven Horsemen of the Multiplex: aliens, pandemics, floods, ice, comets and other interplanetary flotsam, nuclear war, and zombies.

The world is about to end—or, at least, humanity is about to be destroyed—in movies as different from one another as “Waterworld,” “The Day After Tomorrow,” “The War of the Worlds,” “I Am Legend,” “The Road,” “Wall-E,” “World War Z,” and many more, including Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion,” in which Gwyneth Paltrow’s businesswoman, partying in Hong Kong, shakes hands with a chef, sleeps with an old boyfriend on her way home, and spreads a deadly virus around the globe. The apocalypse has been realized as pseudo art (Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia”) and as spoof (“This Is the End,” in which people get sucked up into the sky while Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel shop at a convenience store).

Journalists and movie companies now refer to “post-apocalyptic” films and TV shows as if they were a genre, like cop thrillers or romantic comedies. What does it all mean? I doubt that Hollywood executives have taken up eschatology. In an essay from 1965, “The Imagination of Disaster,” Susan Sontag noted that many of the apocalyptic films of the fifties and sixties (like “When Worlds Collide” and “The Mysterians”) were made in the U.S. and Japan. She suggested, perhaps rather obviously, that such movies were haunted by mass trauma over the use of nuclear weapons. The traumatic inspiration now is less the world going up in a mushroom cloud than the threats of climate change and SARS and Ebola. Few of the current movies are overtly or even covertly political. The disaster is just a given, which suggests a more banal explanation for the end of days: the budgets of many big films can be justified only by creating scenes of terrified fleeing masses, scarred landscapes, crushed cities, rampaging robots—whatever is scary and spectacular enough to pull the audience into the malls. In movies, the death of a single person is still a tragedy; the death of the human race is entertainment.

In “Snowpiercer,” the accomplished South Korean director Bong Joon-ho (“The Host” and “Mother”) tries to transcend the post-apocalyptic clichés. After a climate-change crisis, the world’s cities have been frozen and everyone is dead except for a few hundred survivors who, for seventeen years, have circled the snowy earth on a high-speed train. At the rear, the lower classes live in dark metal cars that look like prisons. Filthy and underfed, they are kept in line by black-helmeted thugs who protect the swells in the first few cars. At the very front, in the engine room, a fascist overlord, Wilford (Ed Harris), who built the train and keeps “the sacred engine” running, cooks himself steaks while wearing a silk robe. His train is going from nowhere to nowhere, but he maintains the style of the one per cent.

Bong, working in English for the first time, has achieved this fantasia with superlative technique and a wicked sense of humor. He stages a revolt: some of the proles, led by the inexorable Curtis (Chris Evans), the excitable Edgar (Jamie Bell), and the redoubtable Tanya (Octavia Spencer), surge out of the rear cars and fight their way to the front. The director has set himself a complicated problem: shooting an action movie in narrow compartments. Working with the screenwriter Kelly Masterson—the project is based on a French graphic novel—Bong maintains the momentum by planting bizarre surprises throughout the journey. He has cast no less than Tilda Swinton, outfitted with enormous protruding teeth, as Mason, Wilford’s chief ideologue. In the grating voice of a Victorian schoolmistress, Mason holds forth on the “eternal order” in which the privileged lord it over ungrateful scum; Swinton has never been this funny. The rebels overwhelm the prating monster and fight a gang of Wilford’s guards, who wield axes, clubs, lances, and various other medieval instruments (bullets are in short supply). The violence, in close quarters, is explosive and bloody—I haven’t seen this much merry hacking and hewing since Mel Gibson gave up his sword in “Braveheart.” In the midst of chaos, however, Bong keeps the center of the action moving toward the front of the train, a considerable feat of camera placement, choreographed mayhem, and cohesive editing.

Once the rebels break through, Bong and his production designer, Ondrej Nekvasil, provide them with a series of sybaritic astonishments: a sunlit greenhouse garden, a mahogany sleeper car, and party rooms in which toffs, dressed in gowns and rave wear, get stoned, drink, and dance. Eventually, Curtis confronts Wilford, who, over the years, has hatched more evil plots than Fu Manchu. If you don’t mind the gore, you can enjoy “Snowpiercer” as a brutal and imaginative piece of science-fiction filmmaking. But Bong offers more than that. “Snowpiercer,” like “Elysium” and “The Hunger Games” movies, presents a portrait of oligarchical rule and underclass discontent; these films are fuelled by disgust for the decadent rich and admiration for the outraged poor. Is revolution being hatched in the commercial cinema?

There’s a fanciful scene early in John Carney’s “Begin Again” that epitomizes the movie’s sappy but engaging benevolence. Dan (Mark Ruffalo), a down-and-out record-company executive—a onetime hero of the rap world, now alcoholic and angry at everyone—walks into an East Village club and sees a depressed young woman, Gretta (Keira Knightley), accompanying herself on the guitar. Most of the crowd turns away and starts chatting, but Dan is taken by her mournful, whispery singing, and, in his head, he begins filling in some backup for her—a drum set starts to play on its own, bows held by no one stroke a violin and a cello. As Dan transforms what he hears (he can do this only when he’s drunk), Gretta’s singing becomes stronger. In this magical way, a team is launched.

Gretta is meant to be a high-minded singer-songwriter, a British Joni Mitchell, perhaps, but crossed with Burt Bacharach: a pop folkie. Knightley does her own singing (acceptably), and has thankfully shed her lace period clothes and her punishing intensity. (I still haven’t recovered from the alarming sight of her neck cords bulging as she gets pleasurably whomped on the rear by Michael Fassbender’s Carl Jung, in “A Dangerous Method.”) Playing a contemporary young woman, she seems to be at ease. She may not be a great actress, but, with her toothy grin and her flaring temper, she’s an appealing presence. At first, Gretta puts off the hard-charging Dan, but no one, we are meant to feel, can resist Mark Ruffalo forever. At once aggressive and wounded, Dan is one of Ruffalo’s classic desperate men. He and Gretta make odd but satisfying business partners.

Frustrated by the stagnant music world, they adopt guerrilla tactics, recording an album of Gretta’s songs all around the city—in alleys, in Central Park, near the Empire State Building. We hear songs at every stage, as they are written, rehearsed, recorded, performed. (The alternative-rock singer-songwriter Gregg Alexander wrote most of them.) Carney, who told a similar story in “Once” (2007), set in Dublin, works with charming insouciance. He makes near-musicals about nice people who live for music, and he brings a relaxed, offhand style—the illusion of on-the-fly moviemaking—to his hopeful fables. Spiritually, it’s as if Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland had returned to put on a show; enthusiasm is the key. In “Begin Again,” just as in “Once,” everyone seems eager to help the two collaborators cut a record. There’s one bad apple: Adam Levine, from Maroon 5, plays Gretta’s ambitious and egotistical boyfriend, Dave, a budding rock star who has the enraging habit of turning Gretta’s songs into “stadium pop.” After she tells Dave off, he sings her song “Lost Stars” in a simpler style, and a miracle happens: he is sensationally good. In the gently fabulous world of “Begin Again,” anyone who performs music the right way becomes an artist. ♦

David Denby has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.